I Dream of Danger (12 page)

Was it worth it?

Yes.

Probably.

Maybe.

She was learning to direct her Dreams now, and not be directed by them. Overwhelmed by them. It was why she’d chosen neuroscience—to understand. And as much as she considered herself a dispassionate scientist, a woman driven by a thirst for knowledge, she knew deep down why she was so driven.

To exorcise Nick.

Oh. Good.
There was just the faintest prick to her heart when she thought of him, not the massive jolt that thinking about him had caused over these long years since he’d abandoned her.

No, no. Not abandoned her. Abandoning something meant an implicit tie of responsibility, which Nick hadn’t had. Hadn’t in any way felt. Had made pains to avoid. So he hadn’t abandoned her, he’d just left to continue on with his life.

Of which she had no idea, thank God.

Since that horrible day in Lawrence, ten years ago, her Dreams of him had been few and far between and mere flashes, not watching his life, as it had been before. Now she mainly dreamed about him, not Dreamed. And even those were now rare.

Even obsessives lose sight of an obsession when there was nothing to feed it, she supposed. She scrubbed all thoughts of him from her head as much as she could during the day. And her life had kept her so busy it hadn’t been that hard. He invaded her head at night, though, in her dreams. There, big as life. So much a part of her mental landscape that much as she tried not to, every other man was measured against his yardstick, coming up short.

Ten years.

She’d accomplished so much since she walked out the door of her home that freezing winter evening so long ago. It seemed she had used up all her bad luck, and it was finally time for the good. On the long bus trip to the coast, she sat next to an elderly African-American lady, Cora, and they became friends. Elle didn’t say what had happened, but Cora understood very well that she was running from something. Cora didn’t ask and Elle didn’t tell.

When they arrived at the bus station in the Castro, Cora’s son Darryl was waiting for them. Cora demanded that Darryl give her a job and the use of a room right above the bar-restaurant Darryl ran in the Tenderloin. Elle spent the next five years bartending and working for Darryl. After the first week, he gave her a raise, saying he’d never met a harder worker.

Well, hard work was what Elle did. She’d done it for free before and being paid for it felt like a bonus.

Darryl hadn’t always been a model citizen and once he understood she had no real ID, he got to work with his contacts in the underground and soon she had legitimate ID as Elle Connolly, California resident.

She enrolled as a part-time student in City College and aced all the courses, not realizing how incredibly starved she’d been of intellectual stimulation. By the time she got her master’s in biology, she had three offers of a full scholarship to Stanford. Darryl always said that he was glad his momma lived long enough to see her graduate. Cora had been there, beaming in her wheelchair at the graduation ceremony.

In college she could no longer ignore her Dreams, and by the time she got to Stanford, she had a professional interest in them. There seemed to be an unofficial group interested in the neurological underpinnings of paranormal abilities, and to her astonishment, a huge multinational pharmaceutical corporation swooped in and funded an official research group. A functional MRI scan showed that the research subjects shared certain commonalities.

Like Sophie, Elle signed up as guinea pig and researcher, and found that many of the researchers had a hot spot in their heads and abilities they’d learned to keep secret. They were all very keen on the project and worked long hours, like Elle herself.

This was the fourth time she’d actually put herself into a controlled Dream state during the day, and each time it was utterly exhausting. Clearly, when she Dreamed at night, her body had time during sleep to recoup its energies. Blood tests showed a depletion in red blood cells after each Dream.

Sophie came back in, handing her another glass of ice water, casually touching her arm. Sophie didn’t touch people much. Elle had noticed that. And like herself, Sophie didn’t date much. Sophie’s hand on her arm was warm, unusually so, and she held on as Elle downed the tall glass of water.

By some trick, the warm hand and the cold water seemed to revive her. A little. Enough to smile at Sophie and pretend she was much better.

“Thanks,” she smiled and the worry lines in Sophie’s face smoothed out. She lifted her hand and Elle immediately felt the cold.

She suspected Sophie was a healer but understood completely if she wanted to keep it secret for now. Sophie had the same hot spot in her brain that everyone else in the program had.

“You okay to get home?” Sophie frowned at her, her hand hovering, clearly wondering if she should surreptitiously touch Elle again. “Do you want me to drive you? I could pick you up tomorrow morning and drive you back in.”

“Didn’t you say you had some work at home to finish up tomorrow morning?”

“Well, yes. But nothing I can’t put off.”

Elle stacked her spine. She felt weak and groggy, but she was not going to make Sophie drive in tomorrow morning just for her. “No, I’m fine. See you tomorrow afternoon in the lab, okay?”

Another searching gaze and Sophie relaxed. “Okay. See you tomorrow.”

After she left, Elle sat for another ten minutes, then realized she had to get herself home now or sleep over in the lab. It wouldn’t be the first time. But right now, she fiercely wanted her little apartment, its familiarity and its comforts.

Elle made it home before collapsing. Just. She walked straight through the door, made a beeline for the couch, dropped purse and briefcase on the floor and fell onto it, rather than sitting down. She tilted her head back, trying to let the past twenty-four hours wash over her.

She had to take a shower and she had to eat, but right now she was too exhausted to do anything but sit there, staring at the ceiling.

It reminded her of her first year in San Francisco, waitressing by day, attending night courses. She’d been younger, though, and stronger. And excited at the thought of getting her degree. Back in San Francisco, she’d been fueled by the energy of exploring the world after so many years in a state of stasis, looking after her father. She’d imagined she would finally start . . .
Life
. Study, find a job she loved and a man she could love. Start a family, just like everyone else.

The study and the job had worked out. The family, not so much.

Actually, she hadn’t had much of a love life. To be brutally honest, she hadn’t had any kind of love life.

When she looked in the mirror, she saw an attractive woman. Judging by the way men reacted to her, she knew she was attractive to men. In the beginning she went on tons of dates, with every guy who asked her out. She was anxious to start dating because what Nick had shown her was so enticing, she knew she wanted more of it.

Except it seemed that the sex she’d had with Nick was exclusive to him. To her horror, nobody came even close to making her feel the way he did. Elle had actually felt repulsion with a lot of guys, not even wanting to be touched.

She wasn’t gay, so that was out. She was a heterosexual lock—and the one key that opened her was gone, forever. So she came home every night to her pretty, tiny apartment and tried not to wish that she were not so relentlessly alone.

She was so tired she fell asleep, right as she was, on the couch, with her coat on. And dreamed.

It was that day again. She’d relived it endlessly over the past ten years.

After months of cold gray weather, it was finally sunny again. The sun shone off the snow and lit her bedroom with a brilliant light that glowed even behind closed lids.

She smiled, yawned, stretched. Dramatically threw the covers back.

Smiled some more. Her body felt sore, used, great. Warm from Nick’s touch still. Warm. She was warm down to her bones. Warm and—and light. A great heavy burden had been lifted and she could move with ease.

She opened her eyes and looked at the rumpled bed, the folds of the sheets and covers making dramatic lights and shadows in the brilliant morning light. Things gleamed in her bedroom, the bright sun catching glints in a silver vase, the mirror over the vanity, the brass lamp.

She gleamed. She felt all shiny and new.

And she had a shiny and new love. Nick.

Who wasn’t in the bedroom or the en suite bathroom.

Or downstairs.

Her heart was beating fast now, the beat of imminent danger. The beat of dread. She looked and looked, the drumming of her heart covering the icy silence of the house. Her cheeks were wet as she called Nick’s name. She swiped at her cheeks impatiently, the beating of her heart so loud her ears rang. . .

Elle started awake, gasping loudly in the silence of the night. Ashamed that, once more, she’d woken up with tears in her eyes. She could keep the tears away easily during the day. She’d rather submit to torture than cry. But at night, in her sleep, she was caught with her defenses down and she hated it.

The ringing didn’t stop. It always took a minute or two to come back into herself, whether she’d lost herself in a dream, or a Dream.

She fumbled for her purse, hands awkward and clumsy, another residue of the dream state. She checked the display and saw the photo of Sophie’s smiling face, hand holding a glass of champagne high, a picture Elle had taken at the reception thrown by Arka for the kickoff to the program.

Elle coughed to loosen her throat so it wouldn’t sound froggy and thumbed the off-image button so Sophie wouldn’t see her face with its tear tracks. She’d say she’d just put on a masque.

“Hey, Soph,” she said casually. “What’s—”

“Elle listen to me because I don’t have much time. Put me on vid.” Elle clicked and Sophie’s drawn face came on, bobbing up and down as she moved around her bedroom. She was pale, sweating, eyes huge and haunted. Her voice was a low whisper, tone rough with anxiety. She glanced quickly over her shoulder, then back into the display. “Les and Roger aren’t playing hooky. And Moira has disappeared too. They’ve been captured and—and taken somewhere. I don’t know where but it’s not good, Elle. It’s like we’re being . . . rounded up!” She was moving frantically, from room to room. “I got a call a quarter of an hour ago from Nancy, who got a call from Moira. It was only a few seconds but Nancy said men dressed in black were in her house. They were armed. She was hiding out in the closet. Now she’s not answering, her phone is dead. And Moira, Les, and Roger are unreachable too. Listen, Elle, get out. Get out as fast as you can. I don’t know who they are, but it’s not good. And Nancy told Moira our sensors are tracking devices. I don’t—” She froze. Even Elle heard the sound in the background. Something crashing to the floor.

There wasn’t even a pretense at stealth, which frightened Elle even more.

The image on her phone blurred, shadowy figures appearing suddenly.

“Dig the sensor out, dump your phone, and
get out
!” Sophie screamed and her phone went dead.

Elle held her own phone in her shaking hand—a thin slab of transparent plastic that had inexplicably become as dangerous as a rattlesnake.

She opened her hand and it dropped to the floor. It didn’t break, of course. It was the latest generation and there were videos all over the net of it working after having been shot with a bullet. It was made of the same polymer as the blast-proof vests worn by bomb squads.

It gleamed there, on the floor. She could be tracked through it.

Get out!

Good thinking. Get out, escape. But not if she had something
inside
her that could let them track her.

No turning the lights on, but it wasn’t necessary. She knew every inch of her home. She rushed to the kitchen, pulled out a small knife she kept razor-sharp, and ran to her en suite bathroom. It didn’t have an outside window, so once she pulled the door shut, no light would betray her if someone was watching outside.

Hurry-Hurry-Hurry!
She chanted to herself as she doused her left bicep with disinfectant. She pressed her finger on the almost-invisible dent in her skin and felt it—a tiny chip Corona had said was a biosensor. The biosensors were to be surgically removed after a year and the recordings placed on a graph.

It was randomized. Half the staff of volunteers had taken SL-61, the experimental drug, and half placebos. Elle had no idea which camp she was in, but it made no difference if the sensor was also a tracking chip. It had to come out,
now.

There was nothing to dull the pain. She had only a rudimentary first aid kit in the bathroom. Above all, she had no time.

Gritting her teeth, she slid the knife into her skin and stopped, brow beaded with sweat, trying to get used to the pain, red hot, almost electric. There was no getting used to it. There was only getting through it as quickly as possible. She turned the tip of the knife and cut at a right angle, then stopped, head bowed over the sink. The pain was so sharp it was nauseating. She waited for the nausea to pass, lifted the flap of flesh she’d cut out, reached into the bloody meat of her bicep with thumb and index finger. It was deeper than she thought and she had to actually dig to find it. Twice she had to stop because she was about to pass out.

Finally, finally, her index fingernail touched the edge of the sensor. She was in almost halfway up the first knuckle. She looked up. The mirror showed her bloodless face, white lips, face drawn in pain. Taking a deep breath, she curled her fingernail under the edge of the chip and pulled.

She screamed, knees buckling. Only her left arm hooked over the bowl stopped her from falling to the floor. That
hurt!
Magnitudes more than cutting into herself. It felt like electrical wires transmitting pain down to her bone.

God. Sophie said to hurry! But she couldn’t go anywhere as long as she had this . . . this
thing
inside her. There was a keening sound inside the bathroom and it took her a full minute to realize it was her own voice, panting and sobbing with pain.